Wednesday, November 11, 2009

You can't own your paycheck. Leviticus 25.

This year of Jubilee thing has bothered me for a while as I've heard various church people throw it in to conversations but I've only managed to nod intelligently like I'm supposed to know all about it. It sounded odd to me that after 49 years you had to start giving the things you owned back to their original owners, unless of course you can give back spouses and children? Just kidding....

Then I read Leviticus 25 (yes I'm still trudging through) and it seems to me it's not possessions so much as income that you can't own. A house in a city is pretty much yours, but a field is not - you are buying and selling what that field produces. Crops = Income. Then I thought about money and realised "Hey, you can never own it can you?". You have no control over the value of your money and you can be rich one day and poor the next no matter how hard you try. Then I went further and thought "this whole not worrying about money/income/food/thing is a recurring theme in the bible". Huh! Then I kept having epiphanies about money, greed, charity, living by principles and various deep things until I had to lunge for the television remote and find the anti-epiphany channel called "Supersport" to avoid getting ephinanynitus.

If you want to live a life of value, income will be a poor measure.

1 comment:

  1. Hey, that is pretty deep...it always bothered me that you might buy something in the 48th year and have to give it back a year later.

    Could epiphanynitus be contagious through the internet cos I think I caught a lesser strain?
    - You should put a link to the corresponding passage of scripture so that its easy to read what you're propondorizing?

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